The (Uncertain) Fate of Baltimore's Confederate Monuments

Abstract

This past January I, an avowed preservationist, made the motion to remove a 129-year-old statue from Baltimore’s prominent Mount Vernon Square. As a member of the Baltimore City Mayor’s Special Commission to Review Baltimore’s Public Confederate Monuments, I encouraged my fellow commissioners to support a recommendation to deaccession the Roger Brooke Taney statue, erected in 1887 to honor the Maryland native who as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote the Dred Scott decision, which in 1857 denied African Americans with slave ancestors the right to citizenship and the U.S. government the right to regulate slavery in the western territories. The motion carried, along with another I supported to deaccession a twin equestrian statue of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall”Jackson, erected in 1948 and located about two miles north of the Taney statue.